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Good morning. On Tuesday, just an hour before the deadline imposed by Donald Trump for Iran to reopen navigation in the strait of Hormuz or face a wave of “civilisation-ending” strikes, a two-week pause in hostilities was announced. After weeks of US and Israeli attacks on Tehran, and Iranian retaliation across the region, the news prompted relief among world leaders.
But unanswered questions are piling up. Israel’s assault on Lebanon continues, with Trump describing that conflict as a separate skirmish not included in the deal, despite Iran seeming to think otherwise. Overnight the US president has used social media to warn that “the ‘shootin’ starts,’ bigger, and better, and stronger than anyone has ever seen before” unless Tehran complies with “the real agreement”.
For today’s newsletter I spoke to the Guardian’s senior international correspondent Peter Beaumont, who has reported widely from across the region, about the chances of the deal holding, how the US-Israeli campaign has shifted the balance of power, and what may come next. First, the headlines.
Five big stories
Middle East | The fate of the two-week ceasefire in the Iran conflict looked in peril as both sides gave divergent versions of what had been agreed. Iran halted the passage of oil tankers because of an alleged Israeli ceasefire breach.
Middle East | Israel carried out its largest attack on Lebanon since its war with Hezbollah began, killing at least 254 people and wounding 837.
Middle East | The UK has a “job” to help reopen the strait of Hormuz, Keir Starmer said on arriving in the Middle East, as Iranian reports said the key shipping route was closed again just hours after the supposed US-Iran ceasefire.
Ukraine | The US has ignored compelling evidence that Russia has been helping Iran to target US bases in the Middle East because it misguidedly “trusts” Vladimir Putin, according to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Education | Many English universities are taking excessive financial risks with borrowing and expansion of student numbers, threatening not only their own survival but that of others in the sector, the thinktank Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) has warned.
In depth: Trump has his ceasefire – now comes the hard part
News of a ceasefire in the US-Israeli attacks on Iran sparked celebration on the streets of Tehran, where the government has also agreed to suspend strikes against neighbouring states. It also prompted a drop in oil prices and a jump in stocks. Both sides are likely to claim that their decision to engage militarily has been vindicated. However, whether anybody has really gained a long-term strategic advantage is unclear.
“I think it’s one of the mistakes that people make,” Peter says. “They get bewitched by hi-tech systems that allow you to blow up things with relatively low risk. But ultimately, wars are fought on human capital as much as technological capital.”
That is one of the reasons, he argues, why this looks less like a path to peace than a pause in hostilities – after a conflict that has left thousands dead, cost billions, and may not have significantly altered the balance of power in any meaningful long-term way.
And that’s if it lasts.
***
What has been agreed – if anything?
If there is one phrase Peter returns to again and again, it is this: is it even really a deal? (Jonathan Yerushalmy has helpfully laid out what we know about Iran’s 10-point offer in this explainer.)
Peter describes the agreement as “half-baked” – less a conventional ceasefire than a hurried pause. Normally, he says, a meaningful ceasefire comes with detail and verification, “because without verification, you don’t have trust”.
“What we’ve got here is more like a set of principles from the Iranians that Trump has looked at and said, ‘Yeah, that works for me’, and then a lot of running around afterwards. And already you’re seeing a bit of buyer’s remorse.” The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, said on Wednesday that the US would take Iran’s uranium if it didn’t hand it over – at odds with the version of the deal released in Farsi, in which Iran included the phrase “acceptance of enrichment” for its nuclear programme.
That uncertainty matters because the next 48 hours may prove more important than that initial dramatic overnight announcement. The key question is whether this truce can survive contact with the unresolved issues that caused the crisis in the first place – Iran’s nuclear programme, sanctions, freedom of navigation through Hormuz, and the wider regional conflict.
“We’ve got no meaningful way to judge what the expectations are,” Peter says, “since different sides seem to have different interpretations – including the mediators.”
***
What has shifted since the US and Israel launched their attack?
Peter is sceptical that the war has meaningfully changed the underlying picture. Iran, he says, has clearly been badly hurt – “they’ve been mauled” – with serious damage to infrastructure and leadership. But on the core political questions, much looks familiar.
Tehran’s public position on not wanting a nuclear weapon has not changed. Nor, fundamentally, has the dispute over enrichment. “We’re back to JCPOA territory,” Peter says – referring to the Iran nuclear deal that Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu long sought to undermine and Trump ripped up during his first term.
One issue Trump will be watching closely is domestic opinion. “This is not like Afghanistan after 9/11 or Iraq in 2003, this is not a popular war in the US” Peter says. “We can all see how much it costs to fill up a car, and Trump knows – even if he tries to deny it – how badly this is hurting him in the polls.”
The impact of the war can be tracked in real time: oil prices, pensions, fuel costs. The global system is signalling very clearly that it wants stability, not escalation.
***
Who has been weakened most?
Peter thinks both Washington and Israel may emerge looking weaker than they hoped.
“It’s not clear to me what the American interest was in this,” he says. “What was Washington supposed to get out of it?”
On the Israeli side, too, the outcomes look limited. There has been no regime change in Tehran. Iran’s nuclear stockpile remains part of the negotiation. And if the aim was to make Israel safer, Peter is unconvinced.
“It looks to me like a massive bust,” he says. “You’ve got the same regime in Tehran – wounded and angrier – still there, presumably looking for an opportunity to retaliate with a degree of deniability.”
That does not mean Iran has emerged unscathed. But Peter cautions against confusing military damage with strategic success. He compares some of the briefings from Washington to the “five o’clock follies” of Vietnam: impressive claims about what has been hit, with far less clarity about what has been achieved.
“You can make a lot of damage,” he says, “but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve achieved your political objectives. We’ve seen this before – with Israel and Hezbollah, with Israel and Hamas. Groups can rearm quickly if they want to.”
The UK has also been affected. As political correspondent Alexandra Topping explains here, the conflict has revealed some important – and sometimes painful – lessons about the UK’s geopolitical standing and military readiness.
***
What are the biggest risks to the pause?
The most immediate risk is that one of the parties – or their allies – trips it up.
Peter points in particular to Lebanon, where heavy Israeli strikes on Wednesday underline how limited this pause may be. “Israel may go out of its way to try to provoke Iran as a spoiler,” he says.
Trump, in other words, may now find himself trying to preserve a ceasefire that one of his closest allies never really wanted. As Peter put it in this analysis piece, having gambled on the war, Netanyahu has failed to secure the fall of the theocratic regime or its nuclear stockpile. It is unlikely Israel’s leader will feel the job has been done.
That pattern has been seen elsewhere. The hostilities against Iran have, to some extent, taken the world’s eye off the situation in Gaza.
This morning five humanitarian organisations including Save the Children issued a scorecard of the Gaza ceasefire six months after it was agreed – and they concluded it is “failing”, stating that: “Palestinians are continuing to suffer extreme deprivation, hunger, injury, and death due to the Israeli government’s continued attacks, movement restrictions, and aid obstructions.”
Even if this truce holds, it would represent only a partial de-escalation of one aspect of the conflict.
***
What comes next?
Pakistan has played a prominent role as mediator – it has no desire for a destabilised Iran on its borders that may embolden insurgent groups such as the Balochistan separatists. But Peter stresses that it is not alone: Egypt and others have also been pushing hard to stop the conflict spreading further.
“No one wanted this,” he says. “In the Gulf they want to go back to shipping oil and making money.”
For some regional powers, a quick and easy campaign against Iran might have been tolerable if it had remained low-risk. It plainly has not. Instead, Trump and Netanyahu find themselves trying to manage an unstable, costly and diplomatically toxic situation that has horrified much of the world. In Peter’s bleak summation, their diplomatic capital has been “piled up and set on fire, and then covered in petrol, and then set on fire again”.
This morning’s most important question is not whether a ceasefire has been announced – it has. The question is whether it can survive the realities it was designed to postpone. Right now, the answer remains profoundly uncertain.
What else we’ve been reading
If, like me, you have always been suspicious about eating fish, Arwa Mahdawi has an entertaining piece on the push to tackle the US’s woefully low seafood consumption. Patrick
I can never get enough nostalgia for my ZX Spectrum, but even if you didn’t have one, Daz Lawrence has entertainingly played and reviewed many horror-movie themed games that were available for the 80s home computer. Martin
In an increasingly complacent world about the dangers of nuclear weapons, Zoe Williams has an excellent interview with Lib Dem peer and anti-nuclear-arms campaigner Sue Miller. Patrick
Mia Clarke has a wistful look back at the early 2000s music scene based around Brighton featuring artists like Sea Power, the Pipettes and Bat For Lashes. Martin
Here is a very entertaining interview with comedian Jack Whitehall, which took place in the wake of his much-publicised stag do. Patrick
Sport
Football | Désiré Doué and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia scored as PSG dominated a defensive Liverpool side who will be relieved the 2-0 margin of victory was not bigger.
Horse racing | A run down of the top contenders to win in this Saturday’s Grand National at Aintree.
Football | Unai Emery has warned his Aston Villa side to respect Bologna, and the Europa League itself, if they are to continue their progress in the competition with victory over their Italian opponents. And in The Knowledge: which team has gone furthest in Europe while being relegated in the same season?
The front pages
“Fragile ceasefire at risk as Israel bombards Lebanon” says the Guardian. Likewise the Financial Times’ angle is “Israeli hit on Lebanon threatens truce”. The Times runs with “Airstrikes risk blowing fragile ceasefire apart” and the Mirror has “And still it goes on”. The Mail lists everything it thinks is wrong with the Trump-Tehran ceasefire, summarising it as “A bizarre kind of victory”.
The i paper is informative on the home front: “UK minehunter drones to protect oil in Hormuz – but fuel bills set to stay high”. The Metro will have its fun: “Oil over bar the shouting”. “Putin mocks Starmer in Channel” – not a Telegram channel but the waterway, where a Russian warship escorted a tanker against objections (that one’s in the Telegraph). The Express visits France where people are pictured clustered on a beach in life preservers – the headline is “Destination ‘El Dorado’ UK”.
Today in Focus
JD Vance’s endorsement of Orbán
Flora Garamvolgyi on JD Vance’s visit to Hungary in the run-up to the country’s elections on Sunday
Cartoon of the day | Rebecca Hendin
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
The sun is out and the natural world has burst into life once again. Spring is a key time for pollinators – and they need your help. Bumblebees and honeybees often dominate the attention on this topic, but there are more than 240 bee species in the UK that are buzzing around. Emma Beddington has written about how we can all do more to protect these crucial insects in her latest story for the Save our species series. Be sure to catch up on the others, too: swifts, bats, toads, hedgehogs and butterflies all need our support.
Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.
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